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Movements in Modern Art
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Movements in Modern Art
Cambridge
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cbi irp,
United Kingdom
Cover:
Frontispiece:
2
Languages of Classicism 32
3
Contents
Perspectives on Simultaneity 47
4
High and Low 64
Further Reading 78
Index 79
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Introduction: Modern Times
The decade before the First World War was an extraordinary period in the
history of Paris. Newly refurbished by the massive programme of urban
development launched by Baron Haussmann half a century earlier, the
city's reputation as the capital of luxury and entertainment was at its height,
sealed by the Exposition Universelle in 1900, which had drawn fifty million
visitors, by the rapid expansion of its department stores and the
proliferation of its theatres, music-halls and cinemas. Yet beneath the
glittering facade of this belle epoque spectacle, Parisian society — like France
itself — was riven by conflicts and contradictions. The dynamic of
capitalism that was driving its booming economy exacerbated already
sharp social inequalities, and met with mounting resistance from working
class men, organised in the new movements of Socialism and syndicalism
(or trade unionism), and from women in the increasingly vociferous
feminist movement. The rapid growth of the city itself, and of its new
forms of mass transportation, consumption and entertainment, threatened
existing, often rural, industries and ways of life to which there remained
deep attachment. Meanwhile international competition for colonial
possessions and markets fuelled a spirit of nationalism which, ignited
by clashes with Germany over its Moroccan protectorate in 1905 and again
in 1911, led inexorably to the conflagrationof 1914.
Within this complex and dynamic society developed the diverse
community of the artistic avant-garde. Drawn to Paris by its cultural
prestige, young aspirant artists from across Europe made this the largest,
.
most diversified and most influential artistic community of all those that
flourished in the early years of this century. This was the context of the
emergence and development of Cubism, perhaps the seminal movement for
the history of Modernism in all the arts, and certainly one of the most
complex and contradictory of the many 'isms' that it spawned. It was
initiated between 1907 and [910 within two quite distinct milieux of the
avant-garde — on the one hand that of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque,
centred on the studios of Montmartre and the art dealers who frequented
them, and on the other the left-bank circle of Albert Gleizes, Jean
Metzinger, Fernand Leger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Sonia and Robert
Delaunay, oriented towards the annual exhibitions of the Salon d'Automne
and the Salon des Indcpendants.This pioneering phase of Cubism as a style
and movement, however, was brought to an end by the war. That summer
a
of 1914, Picasso was painting with Braque and Andre Derain in the south of
France, and took his friends to Avignon station at the beginning of August
to join their regiments; 'I never saw them again, he said. In fact he did, many
times, but by this he meant that their relationship was never to be the same;
the Cubist adventure was over.
Yet it had been approaching its end, as an adventure, for some months, as
the style and the movement diversified through the work of increasing
numbers of adherents, and as its originators began to go their separate ways.
Already, in the autumn of 191 3, the critic Roger Allard had noted the
disappearance of an identifiable group style, and declared the
dismemberment of 'the Cubist empire' to be fait accompli'. The outbreak of
'a.
ways — how this arcane avant-garde style was anchored in the political.
the wife of Finance Minister foseph ( aillaux. (almette had lor some days
been conducting a campaign to discredit the politician, and was threatening
to publish some of his early love-letters to a former mistress. This was no
straightforward crime passionnel, however, lor the reasons for C almette's
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animosity were profoundly political, and his campaign was, it is thought,
orchestrated by President Poincare himself. The first of his motives was
Caillaux's opposition to the extension of conscription for military service
from two years to three, a measure of preparedness for possible war which,
in the wake of the second clash with Germany over Morocco in 191 1, became
idea of which was anathema to the middle class, at a moment when political
militancy on the left was leading many in that class to fear a revolutionary
Le Petit Journal
Robert Delaunay
Joseph H. Hazen
Foundation, Inc.
Bibliotheque Nationale
de France
Disc (fig.3), which has some claim to be counted among the first-ever
abstract paintings. Works like the latter were at the leading edge of artistic
keeping with other works made by Delaunay and his wife Sonia before 1914
Robert Delaunay
Oil on canvas
134 (52X) diameter
Private Collection
significant that such an attempt should haw been made at a moment when
the new technologies of newspaper photography ,\n^\ newsreel film were
taking over from painting and illustration the role of documenting historic
events, and were dictating the terms of visual representation of public life.
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yet Political Drama can be seen as an ambitious attempt, from within the most
aesthetically radical avant-garde movement, to challenge it, by both
reasserting paintings public role and modernising its means of
communication.
If Delaunays picture suggests lofty ambitions for Cubism, Picasso's Still
Life construction (fig.4), made in that same spring, suggests the opposite.
Its collection of humble materials — some scraps of wood and tasselled
braiding, painted and arranged to look like a slice of bread and sausage,
a knife and a wine glass on a cafe table beside a wall — implies a rejection
not only of the traditional materials of art but of all that Delaunay was
claiming on its behalf. Yet, in its way, this little work embodies quite as
fundamental an engagement with questions of the representation of
modern life, and the role of art within it, as Political Drama. Its materials are
not only those common to everyday objects, they also jut out into the space
of the spectator. Through their likeness to such objects they at once create
a fictive space — that of a cafe table — and call it into question by their sheer
physicality and by dispensing with the usual mediating devices of frame and
pedestal. At the same time, likeness itself is called into question: for if the
bread, sausage slices and knife look real, the glass has something of the
character of a diagram, its transparency and volume implied by the wooden
arc of its lip, at right angles to its elevation; while the table-top slopes
Pablo Picasso
downwards, from above, and parts company with the
as if seen glass that
Still Life 1914
is supposedly standing on it.
Painted wood and
In thus combining different conventions of representation, Picasso upholstery fringe
points to their conventional character. Indeed he does more: for while the 25.4x45.7x9.2
(10x18x3'/*)
spectator may not be fooled by the bread and sausage, which are identiflably
Tate Gallery
made of wood, the braid is braid, of just the kind that edged many a
tablecloth in 1914; thus the border between fiction and reality — between
what is art and what is not — is also compromised. Moreover, the status of
the object as art is guaranteed neither by the materials themselves nor by any
evidence of skill (at least, of any traditional artistic kind) in its fabrication;
instead, the pathos of the poverty of the former and rudimentary character
of the latter are offset, even highlighted, by the wit of their juxtaposition. It
is the inventiveness with which Picasso has both conjured this fictive scene
out of so little and at the same time revealed the artifice of art, that gives the
work its charm; it is as if the artist has transformed the dross of these cast-
off materials into the gold of art through the alchemy of his creative
imagination.
Such alchemy drew, in 1914, upon features of a modern commercial
culture that was rapidly growing and diversifying asnew methods of
mechanised production met burgeoning demand for consumer goods. The
braid tassels in particular were an imitation of materials and techniques that
belonged to a pre-industrial, luxury craft tradition, appropriated for more
vulgar use as mass-production brought their price within reach of the
majority. Their deployment here, to designate a table of fake food against a
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In truth both Picasso and Delaunay had moved, with these two works.
some way from Cubisms original starting-points and initial frame of
reference. Delaunay had publiclv distanced himself from the salon ( iubisl
group eighteen months earlier, and Political Drama exhibits neither the
juxtaposition of different
viewpoints nor the fragmentation
of forms that have come to be seen
as the hallmarks of the Cubist
style. If these qualities are
residually present in Picasso's
construction — in the
different ways, on ideas and pictorial practices that had been consolidated
over six or seven years of shared experimentation, as the following chapters
will show. Fundamental to that experimentation was awareness of the
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I
Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon 1907
96x92
on canvas
(243.9x233.7)
Little in their previous acquaintance either with Picasso's painting or that of
The Museum of Modern
other aesthetically radical artists in Paris in 1907 could have prepared those Art, New York. Acquired
through the
who viewed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that year for the experience (fig.5). It was Lillie
P. Bliss Bequest
a shockingly unconventional work, its quintet of brazen, naked whores —
two of them monstrously deformed and two others implacably unblinking
— lined up to confront the spectator across a claustrophobically flattened,
angular space. Even after almost a century, this picture remains unsettling
both in its raw sexuality and in the violence it does to conventions of spatial
illusion, figural integrity and compositional unity. Although it was not
exhibited publicly for almost another decade, the painting gained immediate
notoriety in the artistic community of Montmartre — a fact suggesting that
a tour deforce of some kind was already anticipated from a young Spaniard
whose prodigious talent was obvious, and whose reputation was rapidly
growing in the milieux of those who were making and collecting new art.
That Picasso should have met that expectation, however, with a painting
that appeared to turn its back on that go out of its way to look
talent, to
horrid, was itself as unexpected as the works appearance. His dealer Daniel-
Henry Kahnweiler later recalled that, to everyone who saw it, the oainting
seemed 'something mad or monstrous', while the artist's friend Gertrude
Stein reported that the collector Sergei Shchukin had almost been reduced
to tears by the loss for French [sic] art.
Picasso's motivation for painting such a shocking picture appears to have
come not only from an appetite for iconoclasm and a profound sense of his
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own artistic ability — qualities that have come to be associated with his very
name — but also from an attitude that was substantially a product of that
pre-First World War decade: avant-gardism. A spirit of rebellion against
academic convention and bourgeois taste had characterised a strand of
artistic practice in Paris since early in the nineteenth century. From the
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culture of alienation from the social, moral and aesthetic conventions
of modern of the nineteenth century
capitalist society. In the last years
that alienation both became more acute and found institutional support.
Increasing numbers of aspirant artists and writers, flocking with stars in
their eyes to Pans as the cultural capital of Europe, found their paths to
a glittering career — the state art schools, the juried salon exhibitions and
was buoyant enough to support a new kind of art dealer. Opening his
gallery in 1907, Kahnweiler began two years later to narrow his purchases
to the work of only four or five artists, and in particular that of two —
Braque and Picasso. From the spring of 1909 he undertook to buy almost
everything they produced — a move that was at once a major gamble and
a vote of confidence in the extraordinary Cubist pictures they were
beginning to paint.
A third factor was the growth in Paris of consumerism, at the centre of
which were the rapidly expanding department stores, and with it the
emergence of modern marketing techniques. Newspapers gave steadily
greater space to advertisements, billboards appeared all over both the city
and the surrounding countryside, and people across France, as elsewhere,
were bombarded with promotional hyperbole in all media. The appearance
of Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 'Founding Manifesto of
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A fourth factor was a change in the political temper of the French Third
Republic. The new century had opened on a spirit of collaboration between
liberal intellectuals and artists, on the one hand, and the political left,
parliament. Its reach went beyond government, however, into the cultural
arena, fostering both a belief in the progressive social purpose of art, and a
range of initiatives through which this purpose was promoted: art study
groups, evening class institutes and the like. When the Bloc collapsed in
1905—6 under the pressures of mounting nationalism in response to the 1905
Moroccan crisis, and working-class protest at the ineffectiveness of
parliamentary Socialism, much of this inter-class collaboration came to an
end. As the politically organised working class withdrew behind the
stockade of trade unionism, their former intellectual and artist comrades
reciprocated, exchanging aesthetic for social militancy and promoting
artistic elitism in place of political solidarity.
The term 'avant-garde' appears to have been first applied at this time to —
and by — aesthetic groupings seeking to distinguish themselves from more
orthodox artists and styles. On one level it was a badge of membership,
expressing a sense of collective identityon the part of artists alienated and
marginalised by mainstream society and/or its dominant cultural
institutions, and, for many, expressing a commitment to aesthetic renewal
that replaced their former social activism. On another it stood for the
panoply of self-promotional strategies and devices that helped to
distinguish an artist or aesthetic innovation from the many others in the
female bathers in which relationships of colour and line, figure and ground,
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mass and plane are so orchestrated as to emphasise both the timeless
monumentality of their massive nudes and the means of their pictorial
construction (fig.6). Painted in the year after Cezanne's death and at a
quotation from the seated figure in Cezanne's Three Bathers (fig.7), this
JBESr
i
-rrr
There were other more immediate rivalries, however, than that with
Cezanne, or indeed Manet. At the 1907 Salon des Independants Henri
Matisse exhibited his Blue Nude ('Souvenir de Biskra) and Derain a Bathers work,
both painted earlier that year (figs. 8, 9). Plainly related to Cezanne's great
figure compositions — Matisse at that time owned the Three Bathers — these
two works also represented a striking development beyond the classical
frame of reference of the latter, in drawing on the example of non-
European, and in particular African, cultural models. They did so not only
explicitly in the case of Matisse (Biskra was then a military outpost and
nascent tourist oasis in sub-Saharan Algeria, which he had visited the
previous year) but also implicitly. Though the figures of both paintings were
posed in a manner reminiscent of classical sculpture (and, in the Blue Nude,
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6 far left
Paul Cezanne
Bathers 1898-1905
Oil on canvas
127.2x196.1
(50Xx77X)
National Gallery,
London
7 left
Paul Cezanne
Three Bathers
1879-82
Oil on canvas
52x55(20^x21^)
Museedu Petit Palais
de la Villede Paris
Henri Matisse
Oil on canvas
92.1x140.4
(36Mx55J4)
The Baltimore Museum
of Art. The Cone
Collection, formed by
DrClaribel Cone and
Miss Etta Cone of
Baltimore, Maryland
Andre Derain
Bathers 1907
Oil on canvas
132.1x195
(52x76/)
The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. William
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for an 'otherness' that they at once embraced and feared.
Like Gauguin and the Japonistes a generation earlier, artists of this
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either in the dark continent or in adopting its cultural forms. In the summer
of 1907, he did both, and the result was the harnessing of the supposedly
magical and fctishistic connotations of tribal masks and figures in the
production of what he later called 'my first exorcism painting'.
Like the paintings of Matisse and Derain, the Demoiselles images an
'otherness' that is an amalgam of sex and race. But as art historian Anna
10
Chave observes, where the other artists contrived 'a safe, masculinist
Babangi mask from the pornotopia' whose Jr/550// of barbarity was, for contemporary audiences,
alleviated by classical reference and pastoral location, Picasso composed
Musee Barbier-Mueller, , , 1 •
abruptly invaded by
1 111
Geneva
elements of black Africa'. If that invasion contributes strongly to the
aggressive and disturbing character of the picture, it is the sexual charge
that is paramount; ultimately, however, the two are inextricable. For
Sigmund Freud, white women were themselves 'the dark continent';
many men of his generation would have agreed with a metaphor that
expressed both the mystery and the threat that women presented to their
understanding of the world, and that precipitated a crisis of masculinity
that were exclusively male, from anti-feminist treatises, novels And plays to
team sports like soccer And rugby, which were underwritten by a cult of
action. The artistic avant-gardes were no exception to this, for as the art
historian Carol Duncan observed in a pioneering article, 'from this decade
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19
1
dates the notion that the wellsprings of authentic art arc fed by the streams
of male libidinous energy'. Collectively, the work of these avant-gardes
'defines a new artist type: the earthy but poetic male, whose life is organised
around his instinctual needs'. The rejection of bourgeois social habits that
was typical of the 'bohemian' lifestyle of their members thus had as its
unconvincingly with the more or less conventional space in which the figure
is set. As in Picasso's work, there is a good deal of Cezanne in this picture;
unlike Picasso, though, Braque was less concerned to challenge the latter
than to learn from him. Thus they differed in their adoption of one of
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Cezanne's kev devices, that of passage — the use of parallel short, hatched
strokes of diamond- or lozenge-shaped patches, to
paint, often arranged in
ease and disguise the transition from shallow to deep space in a picture, or
to soften the contour boundary between solid and space, figure and ground
11
Georges Braque
Ink on paper
Reproduced in
Architectural Record,
12
Georges Braque
Oil on canvas
140 x 100
(55Mx39*)
Private Collection
(as, for example, in the National Gallery's Bathers, m the areas around the
heads of the central and right-hand figures . In Picasso's adoption of it.
passage tends to call attention to itself as a device; thus in the Demoiselles, in the
breast area of the top right nude, a hatched diamond shape reads both
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anatomically and as arbitrary shading. Braque's use of it, by contrast, is
more in keeping with Cezanne's, areas of passage serving in the Large Nude to
mediate between the figure and her surrounding space even as they imitate
the uncompromisingly flat shapes of Picasso's picture.
It was over this terrain that the two artists drew steadily closer in the
course of the next two years. As Picasso sought to avoid the traps both of
the orthodox formulae of current painterly practice and of his own
extraordinary facility, absorbing the examples of marginalised or
disregarded art (not only African, but also the painting of self-taught -
with the formal implications of the Demoiselles, he found on the one hand The Banks of the Bievre
that they showed the way beyond Cezanne to a radically self-referential kind near Bicetre c. 1904
Oil on canvas
of painting that could place the conventions of pictorial illusion at the
54.6x45.7
centre, as it were, of the and on the other hand that Cezanne s
picture, (21)4x18)
clear from a comparison of two paintings made in August 1908: Braque's Field, 1939
Houses at L'Estaque and Picasso's Cottage and Trees (figs. 14, 15). Painted in
Cezanne country, the Braque resonates with reference to the master of Aix: 14
Georges Braque
in its colour scheme in particular, but also in the geometric simplifications
Houses at L'Estaque
of its motif, and the hatched brushwork with its occasional patches of
1908
passage. Yet unlike Cezanne, Braque pushes the juxtaposition of different Oil on canvas
perspectives to the point of contradiction, and underscores it with a quite 73x59.5
(28 /x23^)
3
arbitrary distribution of light and shade; rooflines fail to meet walls, spaces
Kunstmuseum, Bern.
and solids are elided, buildings are stacked up against one another like Hermann and Margrit
Rupf-Stiftung
playing cards, and in the absence of a horizon the landscape is compressed
into the space of a low relief. The Picasso, painted in La-Rue-des-Bois,
a village in the He de France, is comparable in many of these respects: its 15
Pablo Picasso
motif is identical, its palette equally reductive; buildings, walls and trees
Cottage and Trees
are remarkably alike in style, disposition and (arbitrary) lighting. Yet in (La Rue-des-Bois) 1908
this case the effect is quite unlike that of low relief: instead, Picasso has so Oil on canvas
emphasised the juxtaposition of viewpoints — pulling the garden wall down 92x73
(36X x 28%)
and pushing the house up as if opening a pair of jaws — that the space Pushkin State Museum
between these features yawns wide. Borrowing Rousseau's sharp, surface- of Fine Arts, Moscow
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projects. Although Picasso withheld his work from salon exhibition, as
befitted a rising star of the avant-garde he made his major pictures
according to a 'salon rhythm, progressing each project through a series of
studieswhose accumulated conclusions were then carried into the final
painting.A series of works made in the winter of 1907—8 on the theme of
nudes in a forest eventually resulted, after several months' toiling and a
complete repainting, in the huge Three Women (fig.16), which Picasso finished
16
Pablo Picasso
Picasso's growing preoccupation with the pictorial issues that Braque was
drawing out of his study of Cezanne, and the associated realisation that the
elaboration of complex figure compositions was superfluous to these issues.
But it was also related to a fundamental change in his material and
professional circumstances.
It was at this moment that the art dealer Kahnweiler began to narrow the
17
Pablo Picasso
24.1x27.4
3
(9K x 10 /)
Musee Picasso, Paris
18
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
164x132.5
(648x52X)
Offentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel,
Kunstmuseum
agreed rates, every picture they painted. He did so for two reasons: first, his
faithful clientele of collectors, though still numbering fewer than a dozen,
had become sufficient to support such a policy. Second, in the context of
the emergent speculative market for new art, the prospects for Picasso's
stock in particular were very promising, even though diminished m the eyes
of some by his peculiar new paintings — indeed because they were diminished.
since the hesitation of other players in this market created opportunities for
risk-takers, of whom Kahnweiler was certainly one. I he consequences for
both Braque and Picasso were more than financial, confirming their own
sense of the importance of the pictorial dialogue on which they were
embarked — indeed m the latter s case they were even greater, for
Kahnweilers support removed self-promotional avant-gardism from the set
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enthusiasm, money or both in his art — Braque, the bande a Picasso and
Kahnweiler s collector His working procedure changed accordingly:
clients.
for the next four years he would progress, not from project to project, but
from painting to painting in an extended dialogue with Braque in which
each work was a fresh point of departure for a sustained exploration and
interrogation of the conventions of pictorial illusionism. The results of
these interrogations were paintings accessible only to this small audience of
initiates, for they were dense, difficult to read, elliptical in their inter-
reference (figs. 19, 20).
This so-called 'hermetic' or 'analytic' phase of the Cubism of Picasso and
Braque thus emerged both out of their collective painterly experiments and
the change in their professional circumstances, which replaced a putatively
19
Georges Braque
Oil on canvas
61.6x74.9
(24^x29!*)
Tate Gallery
20
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
61 x 46 (24 x 18K)
Whereabouts unknown
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-
a reality beyond appearances, to whose truths the artist and the poet had
privileged access. Nothing could have been further from the Third
Republic's confidence in an acquisitive and scientific materialism — the
belief that reality was what you could lay your hands on — than such an
aestheticism, and in the decade before 1914 it became a defining component
of avant-garde identity.
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they were used to promote: the size of the pictures these salon Cubists
painted, how they painted them, even what they chose to paint. For room 41,
each of the five painted his largest picture to date and continued to show
progressively larger works in every subsequent salon for the next two wars .
While artists had been aware for several centuries of the advantages that
large scale gave to a picture's visibility nn a crowded exhibition wall, such
scale was also a declaration of serious intent — as it was also m Picasso's case
with the Demoiselles — the more so when it was the vehicle for addressing a
force, were then widely influential in Parisian literary and artistic circles.
iconographic terms, by endowing not only these figures but the picture
surface as a whole with a density of volumes appropriate to the theme
of fruitfulness, drawing, like Braquc and Picasso in 1908, on Cezanne's
brushwork and device of passage for the purpose.
The evolution of Le Fauconnier's painting was closely followed by the
other salon Cubists, and its formal motifs adopted m their room 41 entries
— in particular by Leger and Gleizes. Leger's Nudes /// the forest \\^-~- was
an uncompromisinglv bold, if not altogether coherent, attempt to maximise
the dynamic potential of he Fauconnier's technique. Gleizes's Woman with
Phlox (fig.23) sought more static and monumental effects with the same
volumetric and heavily painted means. It was their common interest
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and those of Picasso and Braque two or three years earlier that laid the
foundations for the broadening of Cubism into a movement that
encompassed both gallery and salon orientations, and that has led many
historians to see the latter as derivative of the former. As we shall s* e,
For writing about their art, or getting sympathetic critics to do so, was
a third promotional strategy, alongside the painting of big, ambitious
pictures and collective exhibition. Such activity had been an integral part
of the art market since its beginnings, but the surfeit of aspirant writers and
artists in Paris around 1900, together with the revolution in merchandising
techniques, provided propitious circumstances for it to flourish in the
pre-war decade. Marinetti's launch of Futurism in 1909 showed the way,
his manifesto in Le Figaro ensuring that the term had wide currency long
before any concrete examples of this new 'ism' were on the market, and as
Jeffrev Weiss has shown, 'Cubism' was a term coined two vears in advance
of the group debut of room 41 by an art public alreadv primed to seek out
(if only to ridicule) fresh novelties. By the spring of 1909, prompted
21
perhaps by the cubic shapes in Braque's Houses at L'Estaauc — exhibited by
Henri Le Fauconnier
Kahnweiler the previous November — the term had acquired currencv as
Abundance 1910-11
Oil on canvas
a synonym for stylistic excess. Le Fauconnier in particular was quick to see
191x123 the promotional potential of such a situation, in 1910 writing a personal
(75Kx48K)
manifesto, couched in impressively obscure pseudo-scientific jargon,
Haags
Gemeentemuseum, which circulated first among his friends and subsequentlv across the
The Hague
pan-European avant-garde network that had mushroomed over the
previous decade, earning him instantly the status of theoretician. It was
probably for this reason, rather than because of his prowess as a painter,
that Abundance was taken as paradigmatic of Cubism in 191 1. Such avant-
gardism was not only capable of making a reputation, however; it could
also be the cause of an artist's downfall.
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Languages of Classicism
A national literature, a renaissance of classicism; from 1908 to 1911 these
notions were passionately debated everywhere', wrote the literary historian
Michel Decaudin, adding 'but they were often mixed with political options
that modified at once their meaning and their resonance'. Those options
were explicitly understood at the time: as early as 1905 the critic Camille
Mauclair, writing on 'The Nationalist Reaction in Art', tellingly criticised
the current vogue for classicism as encoding cultural snobbery and aversion
to democracy. A love of M. Ingres ... of pastiches of Greece or the 17th
century, goes together unfailingly with reactionary opinions', he declared. 'It
is all a matter of "good behaviour".' For some — those who joined Charles
Maurras's monarchist, antisemitic and ultra-nationalist Action francaise — it
was more than that: a return to the principles of the classical culture of the
century of Louis XIV was imperative if France was to be rescued from the
disastrous consequences of the Revolution. And, for its squads of young
thugs — the Camelots du Roi — who intimidated its opponents in the university
quarter of Paris from their foundation in 1908 until the war, 'good
behaviour' had nothing to do with it. For other traditionalists such as
Maurice Barres, however, both nationalism and classicism were more
inclusive, embracing the political settlement of the republic and
contemporary cultural innovations, since as he argued, 'if one is a
traditionalist, and submits to the law of continuity, one must take things as
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editor of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise) Jacques Riviere declared the
same allegiance: 'I prefer Action francaise, none of whose stupidities escapes
me', he wrote in 1908 to a friend, 'to the radical-socialist league, for which
I feel a truly physical repugnance'.
For young artists negotiating their way through the legacy of post-
Impressionism and Symbolism the classical paradigm, underscored by a
Greece via the Renaissance, And According to which, mystical truths were
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revealed through symbolic geometries. The most famous of these, the
'golden section ratio', was the subject of particular interest in the milieu
in which Gleizes and Le Fauconnier met, and it is likely that it was
among those constructional principles that they sought in classical and
neoclassical paintings.
The arcane character of neo-Platonic thought corresponded well,
moreover, with avant-gardist elitism; Le Fauconnier's 1910 manifesto was
laced with its numerological jargon, and this in turn was imitated by other
that gave his paintings a living beauty, one that must be intuited rather
23
than analysed. 'Thus to love the living work for the vital forces that are in it', Albert Gleizes
Allard argued, 'is to understand and possess nature, since by an act of Woman with Phlox
1910
genius a human thought has known how to contain it whole'.
Oil on canvas
Allard's emphases on time, movement, vitality and intuition were, 81.6x100.3
in 1910— 11, unmistakable references to the ideas of Henri Bergson. (32Mx39^)
The Museum of Fine
The philosopher's extraordinary celebrity in the pre-war decade was due to
Arts, Houston. Gift of
the way in which those ideas caught, in several respects, the complex mood the Esther Florence
of the moment. His emphasis on time (la duree) as the basis of reality — on Whinery Goodrich
Foundation
the recognition that the world never stands still — matched contemporary
awareness of the rapid pace of modernisation; his insistence on the
importance of intuition, as against scientific analysis, chimed with
growing anxieties over the urban and technological consequences of that
modernisation, for which scientific advances had been fundamental; and
his celebration of the elan vital, or life force, reinforced a corresponding
nostalgia for a mythic, pre-modern and rural France governed by the rhythm
of the seasons. It was a philosophy that could be, and was, used to support
a variety of (sometimes contradictory) political and cultural platforms, and
this adaptability ensured that Bergson's name was, for a while, ubiquitous.
For the circles in which the emergent salon Cubists moved Bergson was
significant in all these respects, since they contained some writers and artists
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their concern to represent (in both positive and negative ways) the dynamic
character of modern life. These qualities are discernible, in different
degrees, in the paintings that Gleizes, Le Fauconnier and Leger showed in
room 41 of the 191 1 Independants. Like Abundance, the latter's Nudes in the
Forest (fig.22) is both monumental and dynamic, its trio of classical nudes
seemingly carved out of their pastoral setting, faceted into sharplv
juxtaposed planes and volumes by a patterning presumably derived from
the dappling of woodland light and shade. Where Abundance seems timid
and awkward to modern eyes in
this fragmentation of the picture
surface, however, Leger's painting
seems at once bold and incoherent.
Its three female figures are so hard
to discern that some observers
have found four, and others have
seen them as male, even as
woodcutters; moreover, the
extraordinary dynamism of
its volumes is achieved at the
expense of anatomical credibility,
especially in the dancing figure at
the right, whose limbs appear to
be double-jointed and whose big
toe is on the wrong side of her
foot. Gleizess Woman with Phlox
(fig.23) stands, stylistically, midway
between the Nudes and Abundance:
the solid, even monumental figure
of the seated woman is clearly
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the engagement of Picasso and Braque with the classical inheritance, in their
which classical and archaic art traditions were plundered for their qualities
of simplicity and monumentality. The Demoiselles project and its associated
encounter with African art took him away from these qualities, but he was
led back to them partly by Braque's exploration of Cezannes painting,
24
partly by the contemporary obsession with classicism. The former of these Georges Braque
was a consequence of the latter, for The Viaduct at
L'Estaque 1907
in many respects the contemporary
Oil on canvas
designation of Cezanne as a
65.4x80.7
classicist was appropriate. In his (25% x 31%)
efforts to 'make of Impressionism The Minneapolis
Institute of Arts
something solid and durable like
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38
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I
Cezanne, his pictorial concerns were not contained within the classical
classical formula, in other respects it goes so far beyond this as to subvert it.
The inconsistencies and elisions, noted earlier, together call attention to the
conventionality of painting — that is, to the rules of its conceptual game
and the materiality of its means. In this and other paintings of that summer
Braque learnt from Cezanne how the classical formula could be used to
anchor and order the radical disruption of pictorial illusionism th.it Picasso
paintings, such as the Mandora oi the winter of [909—10 fig.28 . when the
classical order and systematic character of the grid predominate, the result
is a loss of tension and a hint of stylisation. In contrast, in the I tolin and
Pitcher completed m early [910 fig.27 it is less explicit, a structure won
through the effort of reading the image across a range of signifiers whose
degrees of self-referentiality are wittily counterpointed by the trompc~l'oeil
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Picasso's response to the classicism that Braque thus referenced and
explored for complex reasons was, characteristically, to maximise such
interactions and tensions. While his painterly dialogue with the latter
and thus with Cezanne — not to speak of the ubiquity of classicist art
and debate — drew him back to it, he had less regard than Braque for the
order and harmony of classical art, and in the summer of 1909 his interest
was not in exploring the ambiguities of shallow space so much as in
of a year earlier, his Houses on the Hill, Horta da Ebro (fig.29) shares a gamut
of stylistic features with the Castle at La Roche-Guyoti: a limited palette,
diamond faceting, a plurality of viewpoints. In place of Braque's subtle
elisions of solid and space, however, these viewpoints are juxtaposed with 29
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
64x81
(25 /x32)
3
30
Jean Baptiste-Camille
Corot
Mandolin (Christine
Nilsson) 1874
Oil on canvas
80x57
(31)4x22!*)
Museu de Arte de Sao
Paulo Assis
Chateaubriand
31
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
92.1x73
(36X x 28 3/)
Tate Gallery
an abruptness and lack of logic that, as with Leger's Nudes in the Forest
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brushwork allowed, the Seated Nude develops the plasticity of the Horta
painting into a monumcntality that is as mysterious as it is austere, and at
once contradicts this, opening out and flattening the contours of the figure
into the surrounding space. That the result is not incoherence is due partly
to the deftness and beauty of Picasso's deployment of chiaroscuro And
passage, and partly to the effect of the diagonal grid which, although only
implicit, marshals the faceted forms of figure And ground into a unified
pictorial field.
These devices were key features of the paintings of both artists m the
year that followed, but it was Picasso who. perhaps [earning from Braques
elaboration of the grid in paintings such as Manaoru, made the more radical
(fig.32) and other pictures, he took tin- extraordinary step of detaching both
the grid itself, and chiaroscuro modelling, from their descriptive purposes.
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which the picture s subject can be located, and the latter to articulate the
32
Pablo Picasso
Guitarist 1910
Oil on canvas
100 x 73
(39 H x 28%)
Collections
Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris
33
Jean Metzinger
Oil on canvas
Dimensions and
whereabouts unknown
composed — and the differences between them. Thus in the Guitarist, the
figure is legible not so much through the resemblance of any of its features
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diagonal and circular forms set against a rectangular lattice; from these we
read a head (the cylinder at the top), arms (triangular shapes at each side
and a guitar (the repeated arcs in the centre .There is still a crucial, residual
degree of resemblance — elbows are pointed, for example, and guitars have
round sound holes — but it is the placing of these elements and then-
distinction from rectangular shapes in a system of signs reduced almost to
a minimum, that are decisive.
In works such as this, Picasso took painting to the verge oi abstraction.
Neither he nor Braque were interested in going further; theirs was an art
of realism not only because the question of representation of an external
reality was at the centre of their exploration of the linguistic character of
painting, but because — especially for Picasso — that external reality was
simply too enticing to let go of Braque s response was to retreat to the use
of iconic signs: his Chardinesque Bottle and fishes of the
denote the drawers and shelves of the painting's subject; even, as Robert
Rosenblum has suggested, to hint at the absent figure of the woman whose
dressing table this may be, the mirror and keyhole slyly signifying her face
and her sex. This multiple function of the marks And devices in Picasso's
Cubist lexicon was to prove, as we shall see. one oi its most fruitful And
influential features.
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both camps were aware of each other — indeed there was one artist who
managed to have a foot in each, and whose work has done much to create
the mistaken understanding of salon Cubism as largely derivative of gallery
Cubism. Jean Metzinger was in one sense a stereotypical avant-gardist.
Gravitating, on his arrival in Paris in 1902, to the Montmartre community,
he put himself through a rapid apprenticeship to the most adventurous
styles of painting, from neo-Impressionism to Fauvism, and by 1907 had
met Apollinaire and, through him, Picasso. Keenly responsive to new ideas
and ascendant reputations, he was quick to imitate the neo-Symbolist
poetry of the former and the emergent Cubism of the latter. Introduced
by his friend Robert Delaunay to Le Fauconnier, Gleizes and Leger in 1910,
he both recognised the affinities between their paintings and those of the
gallery Cubists, and saw the chance to put himself, armed with Picasso's
audacities, at the head of this salon-oriented group. In an article written
in the autumn of that year he capitalised upon his unique position in
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In the context of the rising tide of nationalism and social unrest in the
years before 1914, such references as these by Gleizes had unmistakable
ideological implications, as will be examined m the following chapter. lew
others in the Cubist milieux engaged so directly with identifiable political
currents, but as these milieux came increasingly to overlap during [911 au<.\
34
Albert Gleizes
Landscape, Meudon
1911
Oil on canvas
147x115
(58x45M)
Collections
Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris
the fourth dimension, which the Cubists shared with many others, and
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through which the scientific and mathematical developments of the recent
past were popularly assimilated; it also attracted those painters exploring
the basis of pictorial rhythms with which they could address the dynamism
of the modern world. Most interest at Puteaux, however, was in the
Section d'Or (Salon of the Golden Section) was timed to rival the Salon
d'Automne, opening ten days after the latter in October 1912. If far smaller,
46
1
Perspectives on Simultaneity
In the exhibition-within-an-exhibition that was room 41 at the 191
Independants, the paintings of Robert Delaunav must have stuck out like a
sore thumb. For all the radicalism of their representation, the pastoral
nudes, portraits and domestic interiors of his co-debutant salon Cubists
were traditional and time-honoured subjects; by contrast, Delaunav's three
citvscapes of Paris, in particular a dramatic view of the hiflel Tower,
signalled an embrace of urban modernitv and a celebration of its dynamism
(fig.35). If this was characteristic of an individualism on the latter span thai
would lead him to split from the group and go his own way within little
more than a year, it was also an enthusiasm shared widely in the milieux of
the avant-garde, as new technologies and forms of mass entertainment — the
automobile, aviation, electric lighting, cinema, cycling, team sports — caught
the popular and poetic imagination alike. I he Italian Futurists coined a
term, 'modernolatrv', for this cult of the modern that characterised the first
years of the new century, and the manifesto thai launched their movement
in [909 was a o^^d example of it. 'A racing car whose hood is adorned with
great pipes ... a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace t
declared its author Marmetti. And he
stressed its social dimension, promising that Futurism 'will sing of great
crowds excited by work, by pleasure. M\d by not: we will sine oi the
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commonplace; Octave Mirbeau's The 6z8-E 8 of 1908, for instance, was
perhaps the most celebrated of a score of hymns to automobile dynamism
published around that time. In the context of the vogue for Bergson's
philosophy noted earlier, however, it was the distinctive character of modern
urban experience that drew the attention of many. His concepts of duration
(la duree), embracing past, present and future, and of the life force, or elan
together. His epic lyric poem La Vie unanime (The Unanimous Life), published in
1908 to wide acclaim, celebrated the innumerable collectivities (of place,
occupation, custom) that dissolved the individuality of each, subsuming all
of which was the city itself: 'I am like a grain of sugar in your mouth,
glutton city', he wrote. For the Futurist painters in 1912, the term had other,
if related, meanings: 'the simultaneity of states of mind in the work of art:
that is the intoxicating aim of our art', they declared. In order to capture the
unprecedented dynamism of modern life, a picture must be 'the synthesis of
what one remembers and what one sees'.
Robert Delaunay met Romains, and encountered the ideas of the
Futurists, in 1909, and his interest in simultaneity overlapped with theirs.
The subject of the Eiffel Tower, which he first painted that year, and to
which he returned many times, was for him both an icon of the modernity
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informed interest in colour led him first, however, not to the conceptual
35 simplifications and exaggerations of the Cottage and Trees (fig.14) but to
Robert Delaunay
perceptual concerns — to an exploration, in a series of paintings in 1909
Eiffel Tower 1910
of the interior of a Paris church, St Severin, of the visual sensation of
Oil on canvas
116x97 deep space and the role of colour and mobile perspective m its
36 silhouetted against the sky and framed by curtains for the column and aisle
Robert Delaunay of St Severin, he constructed that silhouette out of several juxtaposed views
SfSeVew? 1909 — the top of the tower seen from the air, the base splayed and flattened like
Oil on canvas
a cardboard cut-out — and broke down its contours with shafts of light,
99.4 x 74
(39Mx29K) The effect is not only to reduce drastically the illusory space of the picture.
Minneapolis Institute of
but to suggest a new understanding of its representation. 'A profile is never
Arts
motionless before our eyes', the Futurist painters declared in their Technical
Manifesto of 1910. 'On account of the persistency of an Image on the retina,
juxtaposed views suggest not its mobility but its simultaneous visibility to
all the city's inhabitants — one of whom is the salon viewer of the painting,
whose subjectivity is both signalled by the equation of picture surface with
window, and co-opted, by the combined ,\n^.\ superimposed views of the
tower, for Romains' unanimist collective of Parisians
If Delaunays painting stood, in thematic terms, at some remove from
those of the others in room 41. there were evidently enough stylistic features
common them all to warrant his inclusion in the group debut,
to
Metzingers Two Nu des shared its use oi broken contours, the paintings of
Leger and, less boldly, Gleizes, its distortion of perspective, <\nd all ol them.
including Le Fauconniers Abundance, its dynamic plav ol volumes. 1 Hiring
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the next year, moreover, all but Metzinger followed him into an engagement
with the dynamism and simultaneity of modern life. It is likely that they too
were motivated in part by avant-gardist rivalry with the Futurists, though
not always to share their 'modernolatry'.The Italian painters visited Paris in
theautumn of 1911, and met both salon and gallery Cubists; around the
same time, Le Fauconnier began work on The Huntsman (flg.37), a painting
37
Henri Le Fauconnier
The Huntsman
1911-12
Oil on canvas
203x166.5
(80x65^)
Haags
Gemeentemuseum,
The Hague
38
Fernand Leger
Oil on canvas
257x206
(10r/x81M)
Collections Mnam/Cci/
Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris
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modernisation.
On one level, the pessimism was perhaps justified
in late 191 1 and early 191 2. for the prospect of
imminent war with Germany had been brought closer
than ever by the second Moroccan crisis of Julv ign
and its repercussions. To suggest that The Huntsman
was in any sense a direct response to diplomatic
tensions would be absurd, collapsing into a crude
1
was formed. Yet the crisis, in both heightening alarm at the prospect of war
and giving further motivation to the projects of national self -definition
surveyed earlier, could only have exacerbated the tensions between
traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and avant-gardism that
Abundance had inscribed.
Leger had no such qualms; he embraced both the visual dynamism And
the social consequences of modernisation. Borrowing from the but mists
the concept of 'states of mind', and from Le Fauconnier the means of
its representation, his huge Wedding fig.38 . also shown at the [912
Indcpendants, inserted views of the event between the fragmented forms
of its participants — principal among whom can be identified the central
figures of bride and groom - suggesting thereby that what th : painting
represents is a memory of this unanimisl collectivity, a montage of
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recollected features, rather than the scene as directly observed. Although as
complex and indecipherable as The Huntsman it is a more successful painting
in its 'simultaneity' because more controlled. Structured around oppositions
between hard and soft forms, curves and angles, planes and volumes, its
Teaspoon) 1911
device by then, as his Two Nudes (fig.33) demonstrates, the fragmentation of
on wood
Oil
the legs and shoulder of the right figure in particular juxtaposing, to no
75.5x69.5
great effect, different views of these in a manner that recalls Picasso's nude (29 /x27 /)
3 3
Philadelphia Museum
studies of the previous winter (fig.31).
of Art. The Louise and
As we have seen, the use by Picasso and Braque of such perspective Walter Arensburg
Collection
juxtapositions in their paintings of 1907—8 (figs. 13, 14) emerged, alongside
the devices of passage and inconsistent lighting, as a means of calling
attention to the conventionality of painting. As their awareness of the
linguistic character of this conventionality grew, the different views of
their pictures' subjects that were simultaneously visible took on a more
diagrammatic appearance. For both painters, this was part of that process
of giving greater prominence to a scaffolding grid, with the associated
shift from iconic to symbolic and such perspectival
signs traced earlier,
juxtapositions were only briefly a preoccupation in their own right. For
other Cubists, however, as well as sympathetic critics, the device became
a cardinal feature of the style, and the difference between conception and
perception a keystone of Cubist aesthetics.
It was first codified, once again, by Metzinger. In his article of the
autumn of 1910 he discussed the Tree [and] mobile perspective' of Picasso,
and Braque's 'clever mixing ... of the successive and the simultaneous' in
terms of Bergson's notion of duration; the following year his painting
Tea-time (Le Gouter) (Woman with Teaspoon) (fig.39) at the Salon d'Automne was
views of the cup and saucer, and by the rather pedantic geometrification
of her face, arms and torso.
The upon and elaborated by critics, lor by late
distinction was one seized
1911 Cubism was notorious enough to be the object of widespread debate.
On the one hand many newspaper critics, succumbing to mounting
nationalist hysteria in the wake of the second Moroccan crisis, condemned
it as offensive and anti-French, some even equating with the subversivenessit
of anarchism. On the other, young writers rallied to its cause m the little
paintings as embodying a
revealed the essence of a race And a locality, and were thus part oi the
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made no reference to specific paintings — and an intellectual coherence
for whose lack he castigated the Cubists was won at the expense of the
ambiguities and contradictions that made their work so fruitful. The result
was a reductive interpretation that betrayed a certain disdain for painters
LAssiette au Beurre, he had begun to paint in 1910, deploying the graphic flair
Picasso are perhaps too stylised and formulaic — they were soon tempered
with a wit and a visual inventiveness that also owed much to his earlier
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career. Thus Man in a Cafe of 1912 (fig.41), one of his entries in the Golden
Section salon, at once deflated the bombast oi Metzingers Tea-time with
humour, and dazzlingly elaborated upon its display oi juxtaposed
viewpoints, setting its top-hatted subject into impatient movement -his
appearance and gestures inferred by the spectator m piecing together his
face, cravat, hand and hat from the jigsaw of profiles depicted, And in
critics of the Puteaux circle were comparing notes, sharing enthusiasms And
contesting the terms m which their new paintings were to be understood,
these two were pursuing that exploration with a single-mindedness that, by
mid-1911, brought them close to submerging their individual artistic
identities in the shared painterly style of hermetic, or analytic, C ubism,
abandoning for several months even the signature oi their respective
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paintings in an apparent effort to establish an anonymous art. This effort
had been one component of the aestheticism of the poet Mallarmc who, in
his celebration of the 'incantatory power' of words had envisaged his self-
effacement while they took the initiative, as he wrote, 'mobilised by the
collision of their inequalities, kindling reciprocal reflections like the flashes
of fire between precious stones'. But such self-effacement seems
uncharacteristic of Picasso especially, for whom the display of his creative
individualism was, as the Demoiselles project indicated, of fundamental
importance. It is a measure of the
profound significance that the
Cubist adventure with Braque held
for him that he should have
allowed its imperatives to push that
individualism, however
temporarily, into second place.
One moment of this adventure
in particular — three weeks of
working almost side by side in
of difference and position within the picture as a whole (in semiotic terms,
symbolic signs) — in each case, the play of diagonals and triangles against a
rectilinear grid. Yet both artists rely, crucially, on isolated iconic details —a
loop of curtain rope, the fretboard of a guitar, the bellows of an accordion
- as clues, or cues, to the reading of their paintings. Here the juxtaposition
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42
Georges Braque
Oil on canvas
116.2x80.9
(45/x31X)
The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Acquired
P. Bliss Bequest
43
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
130.2x89.5
(51Xx35X)
Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum.
New York
57
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.
and right, denoting two chair-arm scrolls each pictured from a different
angle, are enough, in combination with their positioning, to suggest the
chair in which the musician sits, and also function as units in a system of
differences between circles and straight lines in which the former stand
variously for sleeve cuffs, collars, eyelids, soundholes and so on. Yet m each
painting there is also a surfeit of illusionistic space; Picasso in particular
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signs for spatial depth, surface and transparency, which the cardboard Guitar
had first posited in the three dimensions of sculpture. As we shall see in the
next chapter, however, there was more at issue in papier-colU than such formal
concerns alone.
Picasso and Braque were not unique, within the ( aibist movement, in
Puteaux circle. Robert and Sonia Delaunay began to measure their distance
from that collective from the beginning of 1912, working independently on
pictorial concerns whose starting points were very
44
Pablo Picasso different from those of gallery Cubism, vet which
Maquette for Guitar paralleled in key respects its 'linguistic' explorations.
1912
Both the differences and the similarities were
Construction of
summarised in the term 'simultaneity' and the
cardboard, string and
wire (restored) meanings that this held for them. As I have said,
65.1 x 33 x 19
Roberts picture of the Eiffel Tower at the 1911
(25/ x 13x7!4)
The Museum of Modern Independants brought together his enthusiasm for
Art, New York. Gift of the experiences of modern citv life, and a painterly
the Artist
engagement with questions of the perception of
deep space and its representation, which he shared.
45
as he felt, with Cezanne and Rousseau. While these
Grebo mask, west
Africa concerns were also evident in the other two cityscapes
Musee Picasso, Paris that he exhibited m room 41. they did not constitute
the ambitious statement clearly presented by the
Tower; yet it was from these, rather than the latter, that he developed —
initially alone, but subsequently in partnership with Sonia — a distinctive,
modernity.
The City N0.1 (fig.46), probably painted early in 1911, was one of an
buildings; here, Delaunay has exaggerated the view down on to these .\nd
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works in this series, and in Window on the City No. J (fig.48), painted in
December 191 1, he established with it the means to a radically different
approach to the representation of simultaneity. In this work the screen of
brushstrokes, building upon the pattern of light and shade created by the
roofscape into a consistently diagonal checkerboard, extends to cover almost
the entire picture surface, and overlays a larger checkerboard of squares
originating from the same features. The resulting complex grid, if more
formulaic in appearance than that in the work of Picasso and Braque
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Guggenheim Museum,
the representational legibility of
New York the image is secured by the vestigial
iconic character of these motifs.
49 But unlike their exploration and
Robert Delaunay
celebration of the linguistic magic
Windows Open
of painting for its own sake —
Simultaneously (First
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reading of its non-imitative signs. The development was supported by
research into colour theory, in particular the writings of nineteenth-century
Eugene Chevreul, whose 'law of simultaneous contrast of colours'
scientist
for an essay on 'Light', that summer; 'Light in nature creates the movement
of colours. The movement is given by the unequal relations of contrast
between colours that make up reality. When this reality is endowed with
50
Sonia Delaunay
Simultaneous Contrasts
1912
Oil on canvas
45.5x55
(18x21 3/)
Collections
Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris
depth (we see as far as the stars) becomes Rhythmic Simultaneity! It appears
it
to have been Sonia who first realised in paint the implication of such an
idea: if light itself is what is to be represented, and this with colour,
painting it was tantamount to non-representation. The series of Simukaneous
Contrasts that she painted alongside Robert that summer (fig.50) are
62
}
L.IWJ
Cendrars, whose enthusiasm for the
modcrnolatry' and 'simultaneity of city life
marched theirs. I Hiring the first months of 191
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4
required by painting. But the fact that she had already made an embroidery The Cardiff Team 1913
work soon after their relationship began in 1909 indicates that there were Oil on canvas
195.5x132
other factors involved. As we shall see, these were significant for key aspects
(77x52)
of their art and that of the Cubist movement. Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum,
One was the issue of gender. As noted in chapter one, the regressive
Eindhoven
character of the social relations of sexuality that was a feature of the early
twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes meant that women were excluded
from participation as equals; the only available roles for them, with rare
exceptions, were those of muse, mother or manager of their mens careers.
Sonia was one of the exceptions, but she too felt the pressure to conform.
'From the day we started living together', she later recalled, 'I played second
fiddle', and she never exhibited her paintings alone again until after Roberts
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posed to the patriarchal order by the rise of feminism and the 'new woman'.
and to national security by France's declining birthrate, great emphasis was
placed by men, in all arenas of public debate, o\) the- domestic rot
women. Decorative arts organisations campaigned through the [890s I
advantage, designing floral embroidery motifs for sale, may have contributed
to Soma's turn to decorative work.
Such a turn was also \n keeping, however, with a strong current of
populism that was a feature of the cultural politics of that avant-gutrre,
Following the collapse of the Bloc des Gaudies in 1905—6, middle-class
anxieties over working-class unrest resulted in, among other things, efforts
to democratise art, and widen access to it, by encouraging the manufacture
and consumption of decorative arts, especially those rooted m traditional,
provincial ways of life. As one of the leading promoters of such efforts.
Roger Marx, declared in 1909, decorative art 'cannot be limited to a single
class, for it belongs to all without distinction of rank or fortune: it is the art
of the hearth and the garden city ... of the precious jewel and peasant
embroidery; it is also the art of the soil, the race and the nation'. Of the
Delaunays, Robert in particular shared this populism, though not. initially,
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effort to get used to it . . . for [that public] these are, for the moment,
unintelligible realities. I am sure, moreover, that this is my own fault. The
primitive stiffness of the system is still for the public a stumbling-block
in the way of its enjoyment'. They held back more experimental paintings
such as Windows Open Simultaneously and Simultaneous Contrasts, therefore, from
the Independants, exhibiting these only in gallery shows on the European
avant-garde circuit. For the Salon, they painted huge works on deliberately
popular, modern subjects, applying with moderation and legibility the
(figs. 52, 53), paintings on the popular and modern themes of team sport
and dance-hall respectively. They were followed in 1914 by Robert's Homage
to Bleriot, and Sonia's Eleetrie Prisms, celebrations of aviation and electric
lighting; as we have seen, Robert was working on Political Drama (fig.i) when
war intervened. There is little doubt that they failed in this populist effort,
since it appears from the responses of newspaper critics — who spoke for
their readerships as much as to them — that these paintings met with as
much public ridicule as those of other Cubists, but their intention to bring
avant-gardist experimentation within reach of a modern mass audience is
significant in itself.
Once again it was Sonia who found a more fruitful way to pursue this
aim. If her decorative art and design work was gendered in origin and
••• character, and populist in intention, it was also, increasingly, a product of
; her interest in applying the pictorial vocabulary that she and Robert were
— its principal subject
evolving to commercial ends. Robert's The Cardiff Team
taken from a newspaper photograph of a rugby match — had incorporated
the imagery of billboards, those already ubiquitous instruments of modern
consumerism. It was but a short step from there to designing the
advertisements themselves in projects such as posters for Dubonnet and
other consumer products — thus from an embrace of commodified popular
culture to participation in its production, and the implicit collapse of the
distinction between that culture and Modernist art. Unsolicited by the
manufacturers, the posters never made it to the hoardings, but these projects
were the starting points for a post-war design career that Sonia Delaunay
sustained for over fifty years.
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Cubist movement. Orchestrated by Andre Mare, the project that came later
the members of the Puteaux circle, including Lcger, the I )uchamp brothers
and Laurcncin. Comprising an entrance porch, hall, living room dnd
53 bedroom, the ensemble was, for
Sonia Delaunay
visitors to that years salon, as
BalBullier 1913
unmissable a feature as had been
Oil on mattress canvas
97x336.5 the room of Cubist paintings the
(38X x 132 H)
previous year, and gained the
Collections
French, to remain within tradition'. The objects that resulted, though varied,
shared for the most part the characteristics of (hat provincial classicism that
Roger Marx and others had sought to encourage: bright colours, simple
The project was also a response to .1 less explicit aspect of the decorative
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women into traditionally male trades was threatening their wage rates and
even their jobs. For both reasons these industries were — ironically — seen as
a field too important to be left, after all, to women. Although circumstances
were shortly to change again (as wartime mobilisation and its consequences
once more drew women into the workforce), there was briefly an effort to
re-masculinise decorative art. In this effort, art nouveau, the style that had
the ensemble.
In one crucial respect the Cubist House
stood in implicit opposition, however, to the
decorative arts campaign. For all the
provinciality of their stylistic references, its
practices. Such distinctions were crucial to them, if the former were not to
be overwhelmed by, and subsumed in, the latter. Yet if the populism of
decorative art was a threat to their autonomy, modern urban popular culture
— the rising tide of a commercialised, mass-produced, enticing yet
68
i
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disposable visual culture of the everyday - was for some a challenge, as well
as an inspiration.
Picasso's enjoyment of popular entertainment is well known, his visit
the circus and the cinema featuring prominently in accounts of his carefree
early years in Montmartrc.This enjoymenl was complemented by, or found
representation in, an increasing engagement with tin vernacular that was
registered in the paintings he and Braque made, as a kind of counterpoint to
the developing hermeticism of their analytic ( !ubist style. Kahnweiler
recalled that the two artists liked to play the worker' when they called at his
house for their regular stipend, dressing in mechanics' blue overalls, doffing
their caps and him 'boss'. Braque came from a family of" house
calling
painters, and from 1911 some of the tricks of tins trade, such .is simulated
woodgrain and stencilled lettering, appeared in their work. In the winter
of 1911— 12 Picasso added the words A/1 /( )I II. my pretty at the bottom of
55
a half-length portrait of his new girlfriend fig.^j. Not only functioning
Pablo Picasso as a title within the work itself — and thus an ironic acknowledgement of
'Ma Jolie' (Woman with how unflattering this almost
Zither or Guitar)
1911-12
illegible painting was — the words
Oil on canvas
were also the opening of a popular
100x65.4 song then on everyone's lips. From
(39!4x25^)
The Museum of Modern
early in 1912 he began to use
Art, New York. Acquired Ripolin enamel house paint in
through the Lillie P.
place of his usual oils in some
Bliss Bequest
pictures, and that May took the
radical step of gluing on to a
56
Pablo Picasso canvas a fragment of oilcloth
Still Life with Chair with an industriallv printed
Caning 1912 chair-caning pattern, thereby
Oil, oilcloth and pasted
inventing — or at least, for the first
paper on canvas edged
with rope time appropriating for art practice
27x35 — the technique of collage (fig.56).
(10*xl3*)
Musee Picasso, Paris
These features were not simply gestures of affection for popular culture
or of identification with its predominantly working-class consumers,
however. In the post-Bloc des Gaudies, post-Moroccan crisis moment,
when (as noted earlier) the communities of the artistic avant-garde and
those of the working class were each turned in on themselves And engaged in
small circle of friends And patrons, their art practice \^^d a subcultural
character, and as m all subcultures, their borrowings of motifs, materials
and behaviour from outside of it were reworked, acquiring private
connotations as part of a process of distinction and positioning in relation
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of artistic orthodoxies — of an outmoded 'bohemian' sartorial style, of the
belle peinture associated with vacuous academic and/or fashionable art, of the
notion of art as dependent on craft skills and on what was known as the
were by definition flat, and could be read either as on the picture surface or
as within the pictorial space. In September 1912 Braque took this simulation
70
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taken not from war reports, however, but from the serialised romantic novel
of the day.The combination of visual and verbal skjiis thus reads as a
58
Pablo Picasso
Suze 1912
Pasted papers,
gouache and charcoal
65.4x50.2
(25^x19^)
Washington University
Gallery of Art, St Louis.
University Purchase,
events and this private world oi creative play and affective experience; a
This semiotic play around the border between public .\n^] yvw.nc culture*
and experiences characterised not onl) the Balkan war series 'nit much of
Picasso's experimentation with papier-coUi through 1913. 1 hey reveal his
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delight in the way the medium could, in his hands, interweave with his
arcane formal explorations a multiplicity of reference — via scraps of
newspaper, wallpaper, cigarette packets and other printed ephemera — to
everyday life in all its variety, banality and often, squalor. Close reading of
these papiers-colles yields accounts of murders, suicides and burglaries
alongside witty and often scabrous word- and image-play. Common to
many of them, and increasingly to those of early 1914, was reference to what
separated these interwoven orders of experience, art and the everyday,
namely the conventions — of materials, context and language — of act itself.
Juxtaposing drawing styles, playing with references to the frame — as in the
witty Pipe and Sheet of Music (fig.59) — and, in the spring of 1914, opening them
into the three-dimensional space of the viewer, as in the Tate Gallery's little
Still Life (fig.4), Picasso called into question those conventions, and through
them the status of an art dependent on them, replacing this with an idea of
art as imagination. Pierre Daix's observation about the first papiers-colles is
72
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Avignon station in August 1914; which was to say that with the outbreak of
war and the general mobilisation of French military forces, the
companionships of the previous decade had irretrievably ended, and the
Cubist adventure was over. This was both true and false.
Pipe and Sheet of avant-garde through the war years and after. Picasso himself continued to
Music 1914
extend, in three dimensions as well as two, the range auA complexity of his
Pasted papers, oil and
charcoal
pictorial ideas; Gris and Metzinger evolved, .\nd codified, a version of
51.4x66.6 Cubism that was a point of reference in aesthetic debate for the next several
x
(20!* 26'/)
years. New and innovative artists — Henri Laurens, [acques Lipchitz, Diego
The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston. Gift of Rivera, among others — adopted .\nd extended the style and its pictorial
Mr and Mrs Maurice
implications. Indeed, as Christopher Green argues, post-1914 C ubism was in
McAshan
some respects more important to the history oi Modernism than pre-1014.
But this is another story. I he war was a watershed in the histories of its
~3
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between salon and gallery orientations, but between combatants and non-
combatants in a conflict that, as Kenneth Silver has shown, had its cultural
as well as military dimension. As nationalism secured the terms in which
Modernism, and Cubism its main exemplar, were to be assessed, a mood of
retrenchment and reaction came to dominate cultural discourse in Paris.
But that Cubism was over, and not just different, was also in a profound
sense true. This was not only because some of its original members had
already drifted away, and its collective momentum — Allard s 'Cubist empire'
— had in consequence already been dissipated, but more lmportantly-
because the assumptions that had governed its pictorial inquiries, whether
those of salon or gallery Cubism, were being called into question by artists
74
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agenda. When Vladimir Tatlin returned to Moscow in 1914 after seeing the
constructions oi Picasso and Braque m Pans, the relief constructions he
then made (fig.6o) were both indebted to theirs And a radical departure
from them. Stepping beyond not only the constraints of two dimensions
and orthodox materials, like Picasso's Still-Life fig.4 . but also beyond the
conventions of a fictivc space that continued to separate that work Oi still-
life, like an invisible picture-frame or pedestal, from the real world of the
viewer, these reliefs stood for nothing but themselves. As 'real materials in
real space', inTatlin's own words, they were an implicit rejection of the very
conception of art on which Picasso's work rested. In the same year, Marcel
Duchamp took to their logical conclusion the assertions of the coiiceptu.il
60
basis of art that had been made, repeated And elaborated in discussions at
Iron, aluminium, zinc rejecting the idea of art as craft but also,
and mixed media
tinlike him, proposing art as idea as art
78.8x152.4x76.2
(31 x 60 x 30) in itself.
Courtesy AnnelyJuda
Yet if gestures such .is these called Cubism
Fine Art
into question, they were made in a
Bottlerack 1914
which Modernism was an integral part. When
Galvanised iron that conjuncture ended, and with it the
59x36.8 exchange between revolutionary politics and
(23 / x
1
14'/) at base
Private Collection
the potentially revolutionary aesthetics of Cubism, the achievements of
the latter were fundamental m fashioning, in all the arts, a lexicon for a
Modernism that would represent and mediate the social hie of the
twentieth century. In film and theatre, in music and the written word.
Cubism's insistence on the role of representation in the production of
This has been so above all, however, \n painting and sculpture - though
Cubism's influence on the latter came largely from a\] unexpected quarter.
There were few sculptors even associated with ( ubism before 1014. and onh
one of them, Raymond Duchamp- \ illon, was a member of the Puteaux
circle. His experiments in sculptural form, tragically abbreviated by his
death in the war. related onh loosely to the concerns of his painter friends,
and were closer in spirit to those of the Futurist I fmberto Boccioni, also
killed at the front; had these two lived, Modernist sculpture would h
been all the richer. But most of the cai \ ing- and modelling-based
conventions And techniques with which they worked had ah. ady been swept
aside by Picasso's iconoclasm. I lis relief constructions, growing out of I lis
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experimentation with pictorial space, opened up a rich vein of possibilities
from Laurens and Lipchitz, through
for innovation in sculpture, which,
Naum Gabo and Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Anthony Caro has
been deeply and productively worked. The technique of collage that Picasso
and Braque introduced has had an even wider progeny, its juxtapositions of
second-hand images and materials enabling (among other things)
explorations of — and assaults on — the boundaries and status of fine art
some of which have enriched its meanings, while others have narrowed them
to suit the requirements of the cultural mainstream. In recent years, the
enthusiasms and achievements of Cubists other than Picasso and Braque
have come increasingly to be acknowledged and the complexity of its
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1
<
Photographic Copyright
Credits Credits
Courtesy Annely fuda Fine trustees, National ( iallery ffort h.iN been m
Art (60); ©1998 Tin. An of Art, Washington: photo trace the cop) righi own
Institute of Chicago (40); Richard Carafelli (1); works reproduced
Baltimore Museum of Art OfFentliche Kunstsammlung publishers apologia
(8); Bibliotheque Nationale Basel: photo Martin Buhler omissions that ma\
de France (2); Bridgeman 18, 27 : I he Board of inadvertanth have been made.
Art Library (16, 61); British Trustees of the National
Architectural Library, RIBA: Museums and Galleries on Braque, I )erain, I Hichamp,
photo A.C. Cooper ^Colour Merseyside Walker Art ( jlei/es, ( Iris, I
Beeldecht Amstelvcen (21, $7); Phototheque des collections Robert I )elaunay, Soma
Walter Klein, I )usseldorf du Mnam-Cci, Pans: photo I >elauna) :
<
L&MSei \
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Further Duncan, Carol, 'Virility and Spate, Virginia, ( )rphism:
extensive. Approaches to its Green, Christopher, Cubism Weiss, Jeffrey, The Popular
interpretation, and the and its Tunnies: Modern Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, "
assessment of its significance, Movements and Reaction in Trench Duchamp and Avant-Cardistn,
have varied over the course of Art, 1916-1928, New Haven New Haven and London
the century, however. This and London 1987 '994
introduction to Cubism is
Joan, Picasso: The Cubist Years Avant-Garde and the Tirst World
78
J
3 9 5 6 . .
Index fig. 1 1 ; The Viaduct at l.'hstaque StSeverin 49; hg.36; Gleizes, All
36; fig.24; Violin and Pitcher Window on the Cn 44. . ape.
Abundance (Le Fauconnier) 29, ( iaillaux, Mine Joseph 7-9 62—3, 64—6, 74—5; Ral ( iogh. Vincent \.in
51,33,35,44,49,51; fig.21 Calmette, Gaston 7-9 Hullier 66; fig.53; Electrk golden section rati
Accordionist, The (Picasso) 56, Came lots du R01 32 Prisms 66; Prose on th I
58; fig.43 The Cardiff Team Robert Siberian and of I title Jehanne of mask 58; !
Action franchise 42, 33 I )elaunay) 66; fig.52 France 62—3; fig.51; ( hi rii. ( hnstoplu r S2
African influences 16, 18—19, Caro, Anthony 76 Simultaneous Contrasts 62. 66; ( jus. fuan 54
Cubism
analytic see hermetic the Trans-Siberian and of I. title 56.58; fig. Cuitar, Maquette for P«
Cubism Jehanne of Prance 62—3; fig.51 Denis, Maurice S s 58-9,70; fig.44
Apollinaire, Guillauxne 10, ( x/anne, Raul 20-1, 11, 24, I Vr.im. Andri 7, [6, 19, 28, --,: Guitarist Picasso 41-^;
architecture 76 43, 49, 59; Rathers 15—16, 21; Diaghilev, Sergei 18 Girl with Mandolin
'
/li/w of Phocion, The (Poussin) fig.6; Three Rathers 16; fig.7 diagonal grid ^9, 40, 41. 6n Chrism-., rot
36; fig.25 ( have, Anna 19 Dressing Iable. The (Picasso) 26, 41; t:.
66; fig. 5 collective nature of Cubist Durand-Ruel, Paul 14 Houses at UEstaaut Braque
Balkan war 70—1 movement 20, 55—6, 58 22, u,3o; fig.14
Ballets Russes 18 colour theory 61—2 / louses on the I ////, / lorta da Ebn
Barres, Maurice 32 Complex Corner Relief (Tatlm) EiffelTower (Delaunay) 47, Picasso 40: fig.29
Bloc des Gaudies 15, 28, 65 41; fig.30 lantin-Latour, Henri ^3 Ingres, |ean-Augustr-
Rlue Nude ('Souvenir de Riskra') Cottage and Trees (Ia Rue-des-Rois) lauvism 18, 22, 28, j6, 44, 64 1 )ominu]iu
(Matisse) 16, 18—19; fig- 8 (Picasso) 22,49; fig- '5 TirstDisc (Robert 1 )elaunay
Boccioni, Umberto 75 Cubism, use of term 31 9; %3
Bois, Yves-Alain 42,58 Cubist House (Marc and others) Freud, Sigmund 19 Jacob, Mai 20
Ronheurde Vivre (Matisse) r6 67-8; fig.54 Bruit Dish and Gloss Braque lapomstes 18
Rottlerack (l)uchamp^) 75; Dada 76 Founding Manifesto kahnwcilcr. 1 lenn 12. 14.
39—40; fig.26; Fruit Dish 47-52, 59-63, 64-6, 74-5: jo, 54, 55-9, 61, 68, 74
and Class 70; fig. 57; Houses The Cardiff I cam 66; fig.52; Gauguin, Paul 1 v
at I .'hstatjue 22,31,39; fig.14; The City 59; fig.46; Eiffel C lehry, 1 rank
large Nude 20—2; fig. 12; Tower 47, 48-9. s-. 5$ geometrj »>—
Man with a Cuitar 56; f'g-4s; First Disi 9; fig.3; ( iiotto I auien,
fig.42; Mandora 39.41,60; Homage to BUriot 66; Polttnal Glass t casso Laurens, Hero
fig.28; Three Nudes 10; Drama 7—10.11.66; ug.i; 70—1;
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, ; 6
< \l KUbLIL LlbHAHY
29,31, 33, gfflMMW MliS th^iTmm^Sjhertan and of symbolic signs 42—3, 52. 56,
58-9
fig.37 Nevelson, Louise 76 (Cendrars and Soriia Symbolism 33, 46
Leger, Fernand 7, 28, 29, 35, Nm^5 hi //)f Fora/ ( Leger ) 29 Delaunay) 63; fig.51 synthetic Cubism 59
44, 49—50, 67; AWfs m //:c 35- 4°; % 22 Puteaux circle 45—6, 55, 59,
lettering, stencilled 69, 70; On Cubism (Gleizes and Raynal, Maurice 46, 54, 55- Teaspoon) (Metzinger)
%55 Mctzinger) 67 Readymades (Duchamp^) 75; 52-3,55; %*9
Lhote, Andre 54 Orientalism 18 fig.61 Three Bathers (Cezanne) 16;
passage brush work 20—2,29, Romains, Jules 48—9,52; Trocadero Museum, Paris 19
'Ma folic' (Woman with Zither J9» 4i»52 La Vie unanime 48 Troy, Nancy 68
of Guitar) (Picasso) 69; perspective, multiple 52,53—5, Rosenblum, Robert 43 Two Nudes (Metzinger) 44,
fig-55 56, 58, 59—60 Rousseau, Henri 22, 49, 59, 49,52; fig.33
Malcvich, Kasimir 74 Picasso, Pablo 7, 14, 25—6, 43, 65; The Banks of the Bievre near
40, 56, 58 76; ZTk' Accordionist 56, 58; Rubin, William 25 Viaduct at L'Estaque, The (Braque)
Man in a Cafe (Qr\s) 54—5; fig.43; Bread and Truit Dish on 36; fig.24
fig.41 a Table 25; fig. 18; Cottage viewpoints, multiple 52, 53—5,
Man with a Guitar (Braque) 56; and Trees (La Rue-des-Bois) St Scvcrin (Robert Delaunay) 56, 58, 59—60
fig.42 22,49; && l 5> Les Demoiselles 49; fig.36 Violin and Pitcher (Braque) 39;
Mandora (Braque) 59, 41, 60; d 'Avignon iz—zz, 24, 29, 36, Salmon, Andre 20 fig.27
fig.28 56,58; fig.5; The Dressing Salon d'Automnc 7, 16, 18, 28, Vlaminck, Maurice de [9
Manet, Edouard 13; Olympia Table 26, 28, 43; fig.20; 34,41,46,67 Vollard, Ambroisc 14
16 Glass and Bottle of Suze 70—1 salon Cubism 7, 11, 28—9, 31,
Mare, Andre; Cubist House fig.58; Guitarist 41—3; 34, 44, 46, 47-52, 74 55,
67-8; fig.
54 fig. 32 ; Houses on the Hill, Salon de la Section d'Or 46, Wedding (Leger) 51—2; fig.38
'Founding Manifesto of 'Ma Jolie' (Woman with Zither Salon des Independants 7, 14, Window on the City No. ]
(Robert
Futurism' 14—15,31,47 of Guitar) 69; fig.55; 16, 20, 28, 35,47,65—6 Delaunay) 60—1,62; fig.48
Marx, Roger 65, 67 Maquette for Guitar 58—9, Schopenhauer, Arthur 53 Windows Open Simultaneously
Matisse, Henri 16, 18—19, 2 &> 70; fig.44; Pipe and Sheet sculpture 75—6 (TirstPart, Third Motif)
Blue Nude ('Souvenir de Biskra') Music 72; fig.59; Seated Seated Nude (1909— 10) (Picasso) (Robert Delaunay) 61,62,
16,18—19; fig.8; Bonheurde Nude (1909—10) 41,44; 41,44; fig.31 66; fig.49
Vivre 16 fig.31; Still Life (1914) 7, Serusier, Paul 33 Woman with Phlox (Gleizes) 29,
Maurrass, Charles 32 Li/> w///> C7w!r Caning 69; Silver, Kenneth 74 women 19—20,28,64—6,68
Mctzinger, Jean 7, 28, 34, 44, fig.56; Studyfor 'Carnival simultaneity 48, 52, 61—3 woodgrain, simulated 69, 70
49-50, 52, 55, 73; On Cubism at the Bistro' 24—5; fig.17; Simultaneous Contrasts (Sonia WorldWarl 7,51,68,73,75
(manifesto, with Gleizes) Three Dutch Girls 36; Delaunay) 62, 66; fig. 50
67; Tea-time (Le Gouter) ZTira' Women 24; fig.16 Smith, David 76
(Woman with Teaspoon) 52— -j, Pip? <W 5/wf M«5if (Picasso) Societe de la Pcau de l'Ours
55; fig.39; Two Nudes 44, 72; fig.59 H
49,52; fig.33 Poincare, Raymond 8 space, real 75—6
Mirbeau, Octave; The 628-E 8 Poiret.Paul 68 Spate, Virginia 61
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BAKES &
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Movements in Modern Art
This series introduces the most important JinfsiKMiJIiKJKSJnlSmSJSnk
Cubism, perhaps the seminal movement for the arts of the twentieth century, was also one
of the most complex. Divided between the annual public exhibition and the emerainc
network of private galleries, between French and immiqrant artists :he product
of the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914. Behind the le of 'la be
epoque' France was torn by inter-class and international tensions, caught betweei
excitement over the experience of modernity and anxiety about its consequences.
formed by that turbulent and complex moment. Analysing paintings by Picasso, Braque,
'ith 61 illustrations.